G.O. Clark
G.O. Clark has appeared in magazines such as Asimov's, Talebones, Space & Time,
Dreams & Nightmares. His poems have been anthologized in 2001: A Science Fiction Poetry Anthology,
the Rhysling Award Anthology, and Star Trek -- The Poems. In 2001, he was the recipient of
the Asimov's Readers' Award for best poem, and in the same year
he came in 2nd in the Rhysling Award competition, short poem category, sponsored by the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Also
in the spring of 2001, he joined the staff of Dark Regions magazine as an assistant fiction editor. He resides in Davis, California.

Readers have to be grateful for small presses like Dark Regions (Small Beer,
Fairwood, Golden Gryphon, Four Walls Eight Windows, Ministry of Whimsy,
Wildside, Ziesing -- reading off the publishers within eyeshot of my shelves)
which continue to pump out author and poet collections, giving us devourers
of literature a chance to examine en masse favorite writers who would not
otherwise get the chance that major publishers gave collections from the
40s to the 70s and 80s. The genre would be far poorer
without them.

Writers -- whether they are aware of it or not -- have an agenda that they work
out as any oeuvre gathers enough mass to bear out. G.O. Clark's
A Box Full of Alien Skies should fill
that gap in poetry left by Ray Bradbury's more literary fiction endeavors
proving that, yes, Virginia, it is a Science Fictional world... with poems
like "Where Are You Now My Bug Eyed Ones" which puts Bob Dylan's eco- and
humanitarian-lamenting lyrics of this title to strange use: half-seriously,
half-mockingly lamenting the loss of SF tropes from 50s cinema.

But this next statement may surprise those who follow the sub-genre closely:
A Box Full of Alien Skies is, by and large, not a collection of SF
poetry -- a cumbersome and problematic name in the first place, using
"Fiction" to define itself when fiction is most often what it is not -- but a
collection about science and SF. I won't argue if some contend that is SF
poetry. All the same, we must demand truth in advertising from our labels.

Likewise, the title would have been more appropriate -- though perhaps less
hinting at a vogue for surreal poetry -- as A Box Full of Alien Skies, which
would have laid another layer upon the foundation Clark lays throughout his
poems, especially to "A Box of Eyes" where parts of living creatures, which
may be human, make for a blue-green planet. Yet, the collection
draws its title from "Report -- Stardate 2045":

...what [the survey team] brought back:

...the essence of a thought foretold,
a feather from the hand of the future,
the blueprint of a dream,
a box full of alien sky,
a secret shared by all, and
a reason to continue our questing.

Were I making the suggestions of order, I might have requested this to round
up the collection, ending on a note of hope (a perspective not shared by my
colleague Clayton Couch at Sidereality, but then I didn't quote the first
half of the poem which describes the lost civilization) and ending on the
note that, through collection title, might have resonated conclusively for
me: if a box of alien sky brought back can give us reason to continue
questing, what would an entire box full of alien skies do? By labeling the
collection "Skies," we see we are to take each of these poems as an alien
sky urging us to continue our quest.

The poem that should have led the collection off to tip his readers to the
issues at stake is "Standard Time":

We are
our father's
science fiction,
and

old history to our
children...

...future
and past, caught up
in the present.

I deleted Clark's two stanzas of more concrete idea-things from the middle
to make my point, but something else can be seen while we're here: Clark is
of the Charles Bukowski variety (in style, not content): loose poetry
structured less for purpose than for sound. Note how the end-of-lines, the
one-word and two-word lines don't necessarily carry their weight. The place
of emphasis is generally diffuse. This is not necessarily a criticism so
much as a way of limiting what can be meaningfully discussed in Clark's
work.

This does not mean, either, that Clark abandons poetic structures
altogether. In the first two stanzas of "1958" you can see the parallel
structure of contrasts and near-rhyme (though one speculates at the use of
"despite... gravity" since who would have thought it changed our quest?):

Sputnik
up above,

beatniks
down below.

The quest
for knowledge

continues,
despite the

persistence
of gravity.

This also demonstrates Clark's penchant for symmetry of lines and stanzas,
seen in his two earlier non-speculative collections. With an overview of
Clark's work now teeteringly established, let's back up to an earlier
collection to see where Clark has been so that we might better position his
latest collection (at the time of this writing, his eight page collection I
bought is MIA among the jungle of books I call my room): In Letting the
Eye to Wonder (nice pun on I/eye and the noun/verb play of wonder), Clark
demonstrates an early interest in the fantastic, and the transition to
speculative poetry is relatively painless with investigations of cosmic
sodas, Godzilla and voodoo dolls, robots, gravity and angels. Although a few
poems have merit, Clark has improved his craft from straightforward
observations of our strange and baffling existence, such as a man watering
an aluminum tree, the narrator giving a bird a bit of croissant and the bird
giving him a bug in return. But the two poems here worth selecting for a
book of selected Clark would be "Getting on with her Career" and "The Result
of a Consequence" because the poems loom larger than their words on the
page, expanding within the reader.

Yeah, yeah. "But William Carlos Williams said it was enough just to
observe." Well, good ol' WCW was wrong. It wouldn't be the first time,
either. WCW loved Poe's verse and failed to make a case for it as poetry.
WCW said no ideas but in things -- a sound enough principle -- but what about
Wallace Stevens who turned his ideas into things? If you're reinventing the
way we look at poetry, then observation alone is plenty: by observation, I
mean simply describing a cat walk on a mantelpiece without further insight
into the human condition (my old poetry teacher would flay me alive for my
blasphemy). But if you're doing what's already been done and your words
have no more meaning than what lies on the surface, you're writing verse.
Verse is fine -- and Clark had a few touching and eloquent examples in his
early work -- but it isn't poetry.

"Getting on with her Career"

Down at the mall,
in the empty sunglasses booth,
a young salesclerk sits behind
the counter watching a sunspot's
slow progress across the carpet;
mentally hurrying its advance
like those Friday classroom clocks,
she thought she'd left behind.

This gives something to ponder after the eyes have left the words: It's
like Loverboy told us in the 80s, "Everybody's working for the
weekend"1 (but like many lyricists, Loverboy failed to capitalize upon their
idea and should have turned it into a thing as Clark did here). This to me
validates my point that poetry has to mean. We work and we die, but to what
end? Entertainment? Who is to say or care we have passed here if we do not
mean?

In "The Result of a Consequence," two wind-up Godzillas have just dined on the bones of a chicken behind them in the mind of the narrator:

...both are smiling, like two

old friends reminiscing
after drinks about the wild
times they once shared;

secretly wishing the
old spark would somehow return,
and life kindly favor them

with one, last, unabashed sequel.

(Clark pines and opines further on Godzilla in one of the links listed
below.) The early endeavors for poetry become more frequent successes as
Clark fully immerses himself within the framework of SF poetry in
A Box Full of Alien Skies. SF done him good, you might say. He does much of the
same but the genre adds a layer of dimension to his observations for a
telescopic view -- giving the three-dimensional look of those old 3D
Viewmasters or blue and red 3D movie glasses where you could watch one image
move on top of another. This is nowhere better apparent than in "Mr. Zeno's
Holiday" in which the father learns the paradox of "never getting there"
when his children keep asking if they were there yet -- good observational
detail applied to a mathematical concept. But, like "Earthbound" in his
earlier collection in which the narrator observes a man in a wheelchair and
in his lap sits a woman bearing wings, observation can keenly suit and touch
the heart of its subject:

by photons, fireflies for the
imagining on this summer's night,
the solar system a purring cat
curled up in his lap,

the great starship of
his mind reaching out to touch the
mysterious, fierce beauty
that connects us all,

trying to tame the wild
cosmos with his elegant equations,
while cat-like defying gravity,
space and time.

Clark has some elegant lines throughout like in "The Unfinished Map of the
Sky": "atop a/cold hot plate -- the tea kettle no longer/whistles, a delicate
spider web/crosshatching its spout." But the best I saved for last:

"Riding the 'A' Line"

Medusa has
materialized on
the Manhattan subway,
loudly lamenting about
lovers past....

Behind her....

a reflection
of snakes...

Rudy eyes afire,
she glances this way
and that, hoping to make
eye contact, ignorant of the
unspoken etiquette...

where a new life awaits her
down among the lesser gods, in
their labyrinths of stone.

It isn't the lyrical nature, nor vivid details, nor the idea that New
Yorkers are inhumanly and paradoxically isolated in so crowded a space that
makes this poem new. These have been done before. It's what you have to
think about after the poem is done: maybe there's a damn good reason why
New Yorkers don't look people in the eye. This alone makes the poem one of
the greats in the sub-genre, ensuring Clark's place in a history yet to be
written.
1
To get a take widely different take from mine (I think we read the same
book), see
www.sidereality.com/volume1issue4/reviewsv1n4/reviewofaboxfullofalienskies.htm.